


Born Again

by Ekatarinabeisel76



Category: The Hitcher (2007)
Genre: Dark, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 15:02:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ekatarinabeisel76/pseuds/Ekatarinabeisel76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Snapshot of Grace's escape, and her (metaphorical) death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Born Again

**Author's Note:**

> I really like this movie, and I'll admit that's mostly because of Sean Bean and Sophia Bush. I know what you're thinking - Finally! A fandom she doesn't slash in! I'm not going to say that there was a whole lot of chemistry between Ryder and Grace, and I assume that's why this piece has no pairing. It's just awesome traumatized Grace fic, prompted by my AP psych teacher.

It took her two days to reach a town, but only because all of the cars were blown to hell and the highway was absolutely deserted. She couldn’t bring herself to hitchhike. By the time she stumbled into Edgewood, a small highway town with barely three-thousand-four-hundred people within its barren city confines, her feet were covered in blisters and her shoulders and scalp were sunburned.  
The journey through the small area hospital was like a bad acid drip coated in white-out. First it was just nurses and doctors hollering orders at each other, but then the noise escalated to creaky wheels running over clean and pale tiles as a half a dozen orderlies rushed her down the corridors to Emergency room. Four liters of fluid and half as many hours later, there are a swarm of FBI agents practically pounding at the door of her private hospital room to talk to her (read: interrogate) about John Ryder. The feds beat her parents there by a whole two days, so she really has nothing to do besides tell them what happened.  
From the looks on their faces when she tells them about hitting him with a car and meeting him again afterwards, she doesn’t think that this is the first time John Ryder has come back from the dead. In the back of her mind, Grace Andrews acknowledges that this news does not bode well for her.  
“You’re sure?” The man asks her, with his eyebrows so high that they’re practically sewn into his hairline.  
She glares at him, and opens her mouth to speak small words to him at a nice slow pace so that he understands the level of stupidity she thinks he possesses.  
“I shot him from a foot away, with a double-barrel shotgun. Pieces of his brain are on my clothes.”  
She never says that he’s dead.  
John Ryder should have died after being hit by a metal husk of a classic muscle car travelling down the highway at roughly twenty miles over the speed limit.  
John Ryder should have been dead after wondering around the desert for hours without water and food, and all the while trying to kill a college couple.  
The next question, after what happened to John Ryder, was how had she survived the ordeal. The story began with a loaded shotgun and ended with a concerned motorist on the highway. Grace couldn’t help but laugh at the sheer irony of that.  
It’s noon, a week after she left college for spring break at the lake, when her parents arrive. Grace doesn’t have to open her eyes to know her mother is there, in fact, she fakes a slumber so deep that her mother voices a concern that she may be dead.  
Grace knows that there’s more truth to that than her mother could possibly understand from her cloud of overstated perfume, expensive fabrics, and clinking jewelry.  
By all accounts she should be dead; but her heart was beating and her synapses were firing away at a mile a minute despite everything that she had been through in the last two days.  
Grace Andrews was dead though; that girl would never exist in the real world ever again.  
Grace Andrews would forever be confined to the pleasant memories of her friends and family, while the girl sitting in a hospital in Edgewood surrounded by skeptical FBI agents and a well-to-do couple from the East Coast was just two days old. When John Ryder killed Grace Andrews out in the God-forsaken desert plains of New Mexico, that girl was all he left behind.


End file.
